General’s Iraq Progress Report Has Competition

Sunday

Jun 24, 2007 at 4:33 AM

The Bush administration will seek a range of views beyond the report by the U.S. commander in Iraq.

DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, June 23 — Last month, Congress set a deadline for the American commander in Iraq, declaring that by Sept. 15 he would have to assess progress there before billions more dollars are approved to finance the military effort to stabilize the country. The commander, Gen. David H. Petraeus, said in recent days that his report would be only a snapshot of trends, strongly suggesting he will be asking for more time.

But even before he composes the first sentences of the report, to be written with the new American ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan C. Crocker, the administration is commissioning other assessments that could dilute its findings about the impact of the current troop increase. The intent appears to be to give President Bush, who publicly puts great emphasis on listening to his field commanders, a wide range of options.

The assessments are likely to conclude that the Iraqi government has failed to use the troop increase for the purpose the president intended, to strike the political accommodations that he said would stabilize the country. That and other views expected in the various reports could also provide some rationale for beginning a reduction of troops in Iraq under conditions far short of the “victory” Mr. Bush, for the past four years, has said was his ultimate goal. He has used that word with far less frequency recently.

American intelligence agencies, according to senior administration and intelligence officials, are already preparing to submit their own assessment of Iraq’s progress. That is expected to include a judgment about whether Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is willing or capable of striking the kind of Shiite-Sunni political balance Mr. Bush said was the ultimate objective of the American strategy, and whether the passage of political compromises, none of which have yet cleared Parliament, have any hope of reducing the violence. That report will begin circulating, officials said, around the time that General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker arrive in Washington to testify about what the troop increase has accomplished.

Congress has also asked for an independent commission to report on whether the Iraqi security forces are ready to take on the greater role in stabilizing the country that Mr. Bush has talked about since soon after the 2003 invasion. But lawmakers did not mandate who would conduct the assessment, and tellingly, the Pentagon assigned that task to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a bipartisan Washington policy institute that has regularly published some scholars’ stinging evaluations of strategic blunders in the administration’s strategy.

The commission will be led by Gen. James L. Jones, the retired former supreme allied commander in Europe, who has made little secret of his doubts about whether the current course will succeed, and John J. Hamre, a former deputy defense secretary who led a study mission to Iraq four years ago that offered recommendations that were largely ignored by the White House.

Little doubt remains that General Petraeus will argue for continuing the troop increase. His deputy, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, told reporters on Friday that Iraqi forces were “getting better,” “staying and fighting,” “taking casualties” and adding to their numbers.

“If you ask me today, I think by the spring, or earlier, they will be able to take on a larger portion of their security, which means I think potentially we could have a decision to reduce our forces,” General Odierno said. But he also acknowledged that such claims have been made many times in this war, only to be reversed as chaos spread.

Several officials around Mr. Bush, none of whom would speak on the record about internal White House deliberations, said they wanted to make sure the president was given dissenting viewpoints as he made decisions that would determine whether troop withdrawals began in his last year in office.

“The issue now is when do we start withdrawing troops and at what pace,” one senior administration official said. “Petraeus wants as much time as he can get,” the official said, but added that “the president may not have the leeway” to give him that time.

The reality, officials said, is that starting around April the military will simply run out of troops to maintain the current effort. By then, officials said, Mr. Bush would either have to withdraw roughly one brigade a month, or extend the tours of troops now in Iraq and shorten their time back home before redeployment. The latter, said one White House official, “is not something the president wants to do” and would likely become a centerpiece of the 2008 presidential campaign.

Advisers to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and senior members of Congress who have discussed the issue with Mr. Gates have described one of his central goals as trying to turn down the heat in Iraq, transforming the war from the central national security crisis confronting the nation to an important but manageable long-term foreign policy and military issue. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has expressed similar views, but it is unclear whether Vice President Dick Cheney or President Bush will try to squeeze every possible month out of the troop increase.

It is difficult to predict how the assessments will play out in the next three months. Congressional Democrats, who wrote the Sept. 15 deadline into war-financing legislation, envisioned General Petraeus’s report as the moment they would have enough solid information to decide whether to continue financing for the so-called surge. They say that it could provide the opportunity to peel away enough nervous Republicans to create a veto-proof majority in favor of a withdrawal. An earlier report, due next month, is expected to be less significant.

But with the proliferation of assessments, there may also be a proliferation of contradictory views. That is exactly what the White House sought to create last December, when it ordered other studies to offset the findings of the Iraq Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Representative Lee H. Hamilton. Mr. Bush rejected much of the group’s advice — until recently, when he declared that it was his intention to get back to the group’s plan. He did not say which parts, but the plan includes a call, filled with caveats, for gradual withdrawal of all combat brigades by the end of March 2008.

Within Mr. Bush’s inner circle of advisers, Mr. Gates and Gen. Peter Pace, the departing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this week that they intended to use the report from General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker as just the foundation for their own, formal recommendations to the president.

Already, Mr. Bush’s aides are anticipating that General Petraeus’s report will be met with anger in Congress from Democrats and some Republicans who have expressed skepticism that Iraq can achieve real political progress.

In recent days, General Petraeus has sought to manage expectations in Congress and among the American public by emphasizing that his September report should be viewed as a snapshot of trends for an offensive that has recently gotten under way.

A range of officials have said that the military operations in Iraq are operating on a different clock than the effort at reaching political reconciliation under Prime Minister Maliki, and that both of those are on a different clock than the one marking time on Capitol Hill. But a series of deadlines loom.

The first, preliminary report demanded by Congress is due from the administration on July 15, just as Congress is in the midst of further debate on a bill that would authorize military spending for Iraq for the fiscal year that begins in October. The main benchmarks assessment, due on Sept. 15, will arrive on Capitol Hill as Congress is debating legislation to appropriate that money, the second part of the budgeting process. Any of those bills could serve as vehicles for members to try to legislate troop levels or timetables for the Iraq mission.

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